More funds flow into US elections

A prediction: The US is due for a huge scandal involving big money, bribery and politicians. Not the small fry that dominates the ethics fights in Washington; really big stuff; think Watergate.

It is axiomatic in politics that without accountability there is abuse. This year, there is a massive infusion of special-interest money into US politics that is secret, not reported. Corporations and other interests will spend more than $250 million (Dh917.5 million) of undisclosed funds to affect the outcome of the November 2 national elections.

One of the villains is Citizens United, a sweeping Supreme Court decision last January that gave the green light for the use of corporate and union funds to try to sway elections.

Chief Justice John Roberts' five-member Supreme Court majority argued that massive amounts of special-interest cash don't create an appearance of corruption; none of these five jurists ever faced a voter.

A former justice who did, Sandra Day O'Connor, was dumbstruck by the Citizens United case, cracking, "I step away for a couple years and there's no telling what's going to happen."

One of the few good elements in the case was that the Court came down on the side of disclosure of this campaign money. It's the Federal Election Commission — which for most of its 35-year history has been more interested in protecting politicians than the public interest — that has done nothing to prevent groups from hiding the source of these contributions.

Illegal contributions

"As a result, we have more money flowing into this campaign than ever before," says Anthony Corrado, a professor at Colby College in Waterville, Maine, who specialises in campaign finance. "But voters know less about the source of that funding."

The Obama administration didn't help when it clumsily suggested these secret funds might include illegal foreign contributions, charging, without proof, that the US Chamber of Commerce used money from overseas for some of its $75 million, pro-Republican campaign.

Corrado, noting the Chamber's political sophistication, doubts that. It really misses the point. It would be perfectly legal, for example, for the Chamber to receive secret money from a US subsidiary of London-based BP Plc, or Houston-based Citgo Petroleum Corp, the US subsidiary of the Venezuelan oil company, or health-insurance companies, or big oil companies, or smut peddlers. The issue is that the public doesn't know the source.

The Chamber, of course, knows who gave and what they want for it. So do the architects of what may be the biggest secretly-funded initiative this year, run by Karl Rove and Ed Gillespie, former Bush White House aides.

Rove and Gillespie, with their American Crossroads and its subsidiary Crossroads GPS, already have brought in $56 million— they make little secret that this is possible under the protection of anonymity afforded all donors to GPS — and are attacking Democratic candidates around the country.

When criticised, they say they're just a part of a conservative citizens' revolt. In reality, their brainchild surely relies on a lot of the special interests and wealthy contributors that flourished during the Bush years.

They are shrewd at deflecting attention from their clandestine operations. Gillespie says the Democrats always operate the same way; in an e-mail he cites a news report that labour unions and their political-action committees spent almost $450 million to help the Democratic nominee, Barack Obama, in the 2008 contest.

Donor identity

Gillespie, a former Republican Party chairman, intimately familiar with the rules, knows political-action committees have to disclose contributors; and unlike in the case of Crossroads GPS, voters know the identity and general purpose of money spent by a labour union.

Rove, donning his civil-libertarian cap, expresses outrage at government or politicians threatening to reveal the identity of secret, wealthy campaign contributors.

"There's a case for a need to protect an anonymous, obscure pamphleteer," says Walter Dellinger, who served as solicitor general in the Clinton administration and is one of the foremost scholars of the US Constitution.

"That hardly justifies allowing major multinational corporations to operate in American politics behind the veil of secrecy. This is the mother of all other issues for democratic governance."